No cookies. No tracking. No advertising.
Front PageBusinessArtsCarsLifestyleFamilyTravelSportsSciTechNatureFiction
Search  
search
date/time
Sat, 7:00PM
overcast clouds
19.7°C
NE 8mph
Sunrise3:42AM
Sunset8:41PM
No cookies. No tracking. No advertising.
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
P.ublished 11th July 2026
arts

Poem Of The Week: Heredity By Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Heredity

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on.
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.


Image by Arek Socha on Pixabay
Image by Arek Socha on Pixabay
Thomas Hardy’s fine, concisely argued sestets manifest a profound and consolatory secularity: any hope that obtains in the irony of the ‘eternal’ is born, not of the possibility of metaphysical redemption, but in the evanescent mask of heredity – ‘the trait and trace’ of human inheritance, of evolving appearance and the silent and unseen presence of the biological matter that precipitates continuity.

Hardy is an heir to the discoveries of Darwin, yet is able to insinuate a sense of humanist hope amongst the wreckage of religious certainty: images of ‘oblivion’ and ‘durance’ are resolved, in the space of several, beautifully-worked trimeters, into something more durable still – a look, a word, a notation of memory that rewrite the atrophying of the flesh in perpetuity...

‘The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span’



‘Heredity’ is taken from A Quark For Mister Mark: 101 Poems About Science, edited by Maurice Riordan and Jon Turney, published by Faber and Faber (2000)

Also by Steve Whitaker...
Poem Of The Week: The Old Pantry By Peter Scupham (1933-2022)
Review: There's No 'F' In Wonderful By Bill Broady
Poem Of The Week: Sleeping Through By Faith Lawrence
Poem Of The Week: Abra-Cadabra By Grace Nichols
Children’s Book Review: Hide And Seek: A Little Wizards Adventure By Sarah Jane Elliott